The thing I like most about games is the way that small pieces of magic can slip into every day life. They are places to process even as the world might be decaying around us. They are also places to celebrate while the world is expanding around us. That's part of why I like magical realism so much.

Listeing to Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon by Mizuki Tsujimura  (Author), Yuki Tejima  (Translator) resonated with me. Told across five stories about individuals looking to reconnect with lost love ones for one night, they process their relationships, their grief, and even how they think about themselves.

What stood out to me is the way that grief, tension, and the mundane all sat together quite naturally. Most of the time we talk about grief or sadness it's something that pulls us out of our lives, it's not something that sits alongside everything we're already doing.

People throw around the term Ghibli-esque to mean all variety of things. It's supposed to be cozy or comforting or warm. But what I think Ghibli does so well is allow emotions like fear and pain to sit alongside the magic. They aren't things to avoid, they're parts of the experience. In Totoro the sadness and uncertainty of the mom in the hospital is part of the childrens' experience and a catalyst for it.

So often depictions of pain are extraordinary, all encompassing, pervasive, like life has stopped and cannot go on. Lost Souls had lots of sadness, but sadness in the way that living can sometimes be sad, not overwhelming or impossible to comprehend. That's often been my experience of sadness, anyway. Less all incompassing, more persistent.

The idea that many forms of suffering are just... normal spoke to me. I love books where the magical reality isn't some effort to dissolve the bounds of reality and make us realize that anything is possible. It's quieter. It's the idea that there are small, regular tears in the fabric of spacetime where all sorts of things are possible.

(Like games perhaps?)